In contrast to all the technical stuff that I usually write about, this blog post is different. Today I stumbled upon a 2-minute video clip that was presented to me as an advertisement when I was browsing youtoube. The clip is about Hans Zimmer who advertises his new “Film Scoring Masterclass”. This two minute clip […]

Well, technically, its not really a book, but almost! The editors from the Software & Support Media Group (https://sandsmedia.com/de) took the two articles that I wrote earlier this year and converted them into a so-called “shortcut” which is nothing more than a short e-book. The e-book is called “Powershell – Grundlagen für .NET-Entwickler” and is […]

This week I had the opportunity to attend the Microsoft MVP Summit 2016, taking place in Bellevue and Redmond, near Seattle. It was a very intense week with lots of new people that I got to know and a huge amount of information provided by Microsoft. It makes me proud to be a part of […]

Over the years that I have been working as a .NET developer and consultant for a large number of different customers, I picked up a lot of simple, yet effective productivity tricks. As of today, there is a new category on my blog called “.NET Power Tips”. I represents a growing list of tips related […]

Copying and pasting is an essential part of every developers life. It is so essential that you can even buy a book with instructions: Ok, jokes aside, Visual Studio offers a great feature called the Cycle Clipboard ring: The clipboard ring remembers every piece of text that you cut or copy from the text editor. […]

I watch many developers deleting and copying code lines in Visual Studio in an unnecessary complicated procedure. They place the cursor inside the line that they need to delete, cut or copy. Then they use either the mouse or the keyboard to expand the selection to the entire line. With the keyboard, that would be: […]

Usually, when selecting text in a text editor, the text is selected line by line. This means that if I would hold the mouse button in the middle of a line and drag down, the selection would automatically select the current line to the end and continue with the next line. With block selection it […]

There is an interesting function in Visual Studio hidden in the options menu: Scroll Bar Map Mode. Going to TOOLS –> OPTIONS –> TEXT EDITOR –> ALL LANGUAGES –> SCROLL BARS the scroll bar style can be changed to map mode. There is a shortcut to activate the map mode: Just go to the Quick […]

You might be familiar with the standard search functionality in Visual Studio accessible via CTRL-F. Personally, I hardly use it. There is a better alternative: FIND IN FILES. Find in Files can be started with the shortcut CTRL-SHIFT-F. It will open a search window, as usual. The difference is that on enter, it will NOT […]

A very useful but little known window in VS2015 is the Call Hierarchy Window. It can be used to find dependencies of a method or another member of a class. Executing VIEW CALL HIERARCHY WINDOW (CTRL-K, T) opens the window: In the image, we take a closer look at the AddChild() method. A tree structure […]

This power tip introduces a couple of shortcuts that can be used to navigate through code files in Visual Studio. I am often surprised about how many developers don’t know or don’t use some of the most basic shortcuts. Note that the mentioned key bindings can be different in your edition of Visual Studio. […]

This blog post introduces Open Live Writer and explains how to solve the “Cannot Detect WordPress Theme” problem. If you are a blogger and you don’t know Open Live Writer, it’s time you get to know it. What is Open Live Writer? Open Live Writer (OLW) is the successor of the very, very old […]

Today I stumbled upon a GREAT article that I just need to share. The article is “Things You Should Never Do” by Joel Spolsky. http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html In case you don’t know Joel Spolsky, he is the founder of stuff like www.trello.com or http://stackoverflow.com and is currently the CEO of Stackoverflow. He is also the […]